Speculative Fiction—an all-encompassing genre created to describe stories of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, and other stories that have an element of “What if...” in them. A story in speculative fiction is one that adds an element of the unreal, or asks, what would become of our society if history took a different direction at some important event? Fiction with a little something extra thrown in.—William D. Richards

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Thursday, April 5, 2018

The Empire of Dust (The Chronicles of the Second Interstellar Empire of Mankind, Book 3) by Robert I. Katz

Release date: March 25, 2018

Subgenre: Space opera

About The Empire of Dust:

Michael Glover survived every mission the Empire assigned him and then he survived the revolution that ended it all.

But can he survive when everything he knew and held dear has vanished into the past?

Awakened
after 2000 years to find a new Empire rising to replace the old,
Michael is given a second chance to make a difference. Can he take
advantage of that chance? Does he even want to?

Trouble is
brewing among the stars. Ships are vanishing. Military bases are being
attacked. Chaos is spreading. Is this random piracy or a wide-spread
conspiracy?

Naval intelligence is desperate to find out and
Michael Glover, a soldier without a country, a man thought dead for over
2000 years, reluctantly decides that he cannot stand by when duty
calls.

It’s a new Empire but the same old mission, and Michael Glover, deep in his soul, is still a soldier who can be counted on.

But
Michael Glover has an independent streak. He’ll carry out the mission
but he’ going to do it in his own inimitable way, whether naval
intelligence likes it or not.

You will love this fast-paced science fiction adventure from award winning author, Robert I. Katz.

Buy it now!

Excerpt:

Prologue

He
groaned as the cold slowly seeped into his awareness. Dimly, he felt that he
might have shivered but he wasn’t certain of this. He was numb. Am I alive? He
thought that he must be. I think, therefore…how did that go? Something. The
thought hung there in the back of his brain, elusive. Slowly, he wriggled his
fingers, then his toes. He tried to blink his eyes but the darkness was
absolute. Maybe he succeeded. He couldn’t tell. Fingers and toes then. He
wriggled them again then clenched his fists. If I have hands then I must have arms, and legs. That was a
comforting thought. Arms and legs were good, at least a start. He tried to cry
out but something liquid and harsh filled his mouth.

Wait,
a voice seemed to say. Everything will be explained. Give it time. Was this his
own thought or did it come from somewhere outside? Something that might have
been amusement filled his mind. He had nowhere to go and nothing but time.

For
a time then, he slept.

Chapter 1

The
planet was dusty, almost barren, but there was life. It clustered around the
oases and on the coasts, people struggling to make a living. Their database
listed the world as Baldur-3, the third world in the Baldur system. The local
web was unshielded and easy to access. The city below them was called Norwich.

“What
do you think?” Michael Glover asked.

“We
need fuel,” Romulus
said. “They have fuel.”

Deuterium
for the fusion generators. They had jumped far and this was the first human
settled world they had come across in over a month that was more than a series
of ruins. “I don’t know,” Michael said. “They’re not exactly high tech.”

“High
enough. The world is clean and orderly. There are three universities on the
Western continent and another five on the Eastern. They’re not barbarians.
They’ll have what we need.”

Michael
shrugged. “Better than nothing.”

The
ship’s sensors had revealed a landing field on a large island off the coast of
the Eastern continent. He instructed the AI to approach. They were hailed when
still fifty kilometers up. “Unknown ship. State your business and world of
origin.”

“This
is the starship London,” Michael
said. “Out of Beta Ionis-4.” It was nonsense, of course. Beta Ionis was a
rocky, frozen system with a population of sentient, low temperature aliens that
had never developed interstellar travel. Humanity had been trading with them
for thousands of years.

The
voice seemed to hesitate. “We have no record of human habitation in the
Beta-Ionis system.”

“We
maintain a habitat in the asteroid belt.” This was true, or it was true in the
days of the Empire. Regardless, it was not a statement that could be disproven
from half a galaxy away.

“Please
state your business.”

“The
London is a merchant vessel. I have a
cargo to sell and I wish to purchase deuterium.”

“The
names of your crew?”

“There
is only myself. My name is Michael Glover.”

After
a moment, the voice said. “You may land. Please follow the beacon to slip
number eight.”

Twenty
minutes later, the London settled
into the designated location. Up close, the port was busier than Michael had
expected. Cargo carriers rolled across the dusty tarmac. Three other slips were
occupied, all with ships somewhat smaller than their own. “I think you should
stay aboard,” Michael said. “Actually, you should stay hidden.”

Romulus
looked nothing like Homo Sapiens. His
matte black composite structure possessed arms, legs and a head only as a
concession to human sensibilities. Romulus
nodded. Without a word, he pressed a panel in the wall of the main cabin. The
panel slid open. The robot entered and the panel slid seamlessly closed.

Five
minutes later, the port inspectors arrived, one small, young and female, the
other male, of indeterminate age, with a harried expression on his face.
Michael pressed a button. A metal ramp unfolded and the main airlock opened. The
inspectors entered, glancing curiously around the cabin. “Captain Glover?” The
male inspector held out a hand. Michael took it. “I’m Chief Inspector Mark
Conway. This is Assistant Inspector Natalie Levin. Welcome to Baldur.”

Natalie
Levin frowned. “You’re really the only one aboard? I’ve heard of fully
automated ships. I’ve never seen one.”

Michael
smiled. “We’re proud of it. It’s a copy of an ancient First Empire design.”

“Well,
we’ll need to inspect your cargo.”

“Feel
free.”

The
cargo had been carefully chosen. Little of it was high tech, mainly inexpensive
but no longer up-to-date pre-fab matrices and solid state transistors that
could be adapted to a variety of computer platforms, spices from five different
worlds that had been stored in liquid nitrogen for over two thousand years, a
lockbox of uncut jewels, most of them unique to their own worlds of origin,
another lockbox containing small ingots of gold and another of platinum, and
pallets of spider silk from the jungles of Rigel.

Natalie
Levin pursed her lips when she saw the manifest and frowned at Michael. “You
can’t trade the spices here unless you get authorization from the medical
authorities declaring them safe for human consumption. Also, the matrices might
contain viruses that our own computers aren’t equipped to handle. You’re not
allowed to sell them or let them connect to the local web. The rest of it is
approved.” She tore a sheet of paper off a clipboard. “Post this in your cargo
bay where prospective buyers can see it. Good luck.”

“An
interesting cargo,” Conway
said. “You’ve travelled widely.”

“It’s
what I do,” Michael said. “Buy low and sell high.” It was a plausible statement
but not exactly the truth. It could easily become the truth, however. He had to
do something to occupy his time and whatever that something ultimately turned
out to be, an itinerant merchant captain made an excellent cover.

“Your
papers are in order,” Conway
said. “I suggest that you head over to the merchant’s guild. They’ll put you in
touch with potential buyers.” He glanced at a comp on his wrist. “Too late
tonight, though. They open first thing in the morning.”

“Thank
you,” Michael said. “I’ll do that. Meanwhile, what is there to do at night in
your fair city?” Calling it a city was definitely a stretch but it never hurt
to be polite.

Natalie
Levin snorted. “Not much,” she said.

Conway smiled at her. “We have some
excellent restaurants, a zoo and a museum. There are a number of local sports
teams but none of them are playing this evening. Two small theaters offer live
entertainment. One of them is playing Twelfth
Night, the 5714 translation. Also, the local web carries numerous channels.
If you want to get off your ship, there are three reasonable hotels in the
center of town.” He shrugged. “Good luck.”

They
shook hands again, Michael thanked them both and waited until they had gone and
the airlock closed behind them before saying, “What do you think?”

Romulus’ voice issued from a speaker
grid near the ceiling. “Everything seems in order. I’m not expecting trouble.”

About Robert I. Katz:

I
grew up on Long Island, in a pleasant, suburban town about 30 miles
from New York City. I loved to read from a very early age and graduated
from Columbia in 1974 with a degree in English. Not encouraged by the
job prospects for English majors at the time, I went on to medical
school at Northwestern, where in addition to my medical degree, I
acquired a life-long love of deep dish pizza. I did a residency in
Anesthesiology at Columbia Presbyterian and spent most of my career at
Stony Brook University, where I ultimately attained the academic rank of
Professor and Vice-Chairman for Administration, Department of
Anesthesiology.

When
I was a child, I generally read five or more books per week, and even
then, I had a dim sense that I could do at least as well as many of the
stories that I was reading. Finally, around 1985, with a job and a
family and my first personal computer, I began writing. I quickly
discovered that it was not as easy as I had imagined, and like most
beginning writers, it took me many years to produce a publishable work
of fiction. My first novel, Edward Maret: A Novel of the Future, came out in 2001. It won the ASA Literary Prize for 2001 and received excellent reviews from Science Fiction Chronicle, InfinityPlus, Scavenger’s Newsletter and many others.

My
agent at the time urged me to write mysteries, as mysteries are
supposed to have a larger readership and be easier to publish than
science fiction. Since I have read almost as many mysteries as science
fiction and fantasy, and since I enjoy them just as much, I had no
objection to this plan. The Kurtz and Barent mystery series, Surgical Risk, The Anatomy Lesson and Seizure followed
between 2002 and 2009. Reviewers have compared them favorably to
Patricia Cornwell and Robin Cook and they’ve received positive reviews
from The Midwest Book Review, Mystery Review Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Lady M’s Mystery International, Mystery Scene Magazine, Library Journal and many others.

In 2014, I published a science fiction short story, To the Ends of the Earth in the Deep Blue Sea
on Kindle for Amazon. Since then, I have made all of my previously
published novels available for purchase on Kindle. A new science fiction
novel, entitled The Cannibal's Feast, was published in July 2017. The next, entitled The Game Players of Meridien,
a tale set far in the future after the collapse of the First
Interstellar Empire of Mankind, is the first in a projected seven book
science fiction series, and will be published on December 16, 2017. The
second novel in the series, The City of Ashes, will appear early in 2018. In addition, a fourth novel in the Kurtz and Barent mystery series, The Chairmen, will also be published in the first half of 2018.

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